Day: February 27, 2008

Following on from my post last week on cleansing your reputation, last Sunday’s UK Times has a follow up written by Rosie Millard on her personal travails with someone hijacking her online reputation.

Rosie goes and talks to some "online reputation management" experts.

Seriously folks, this shouldn’t be a standalone business. 

Online reputation management (clear, above board, no shady practices) should be a standard service offered by Public Relations consultants everywhere. If you’re not convinced… according to the article the daily rate for these services is £900.

I rarely hear PR folks talking about this issue and we should be.

“Sometimes this happens to reasonably high-profile people because there are those out there who will buy the domain, put up a site and then snag any casual traffic associated with your name to get ad revenue,” says Michael Fertik, 29, who runs Reputation Defender in California. “And this one looks like a strong site. More than 30,000 people have already visited it, and the longer it stays up, the stronger it gets, because Google prefers legacy over immediacy. We see cases like yours all the time.”

The article references some interesting resources:

• World Intellectual Property Organization Guidelines on Domain Name Dispute Resolution
• Attenalert – keyword monitoring
• Trackur – online reputation montitoring
• Nominet – UK domain dispute resolution
• IEDR – Irish domain dispute resolution

The Bad Pitch blog has unearthed a fascinating site I hadn’t heard of before: AngryJournalist.com which provides a welcome facility for journalist to vent about what’s bugging them.

While there’s plenty of venting about PR, I was actually surprised there wasn’t more.  Unfortunately the site is anonymous and there’s no tags or categories so you just have to wade through the comments, but it’s an interesting browse…

PR people who don’t do their research. They insist on wasting my time to promote their pathetic story which if they knew ANYTHING about our paper would know that we’re not interested at all. As well as asking if I would like to meet with a representative from their organisation when they visit a town four hours away from me.

They’re probably getting paid more than me too…bastards.

#1091

Kevin Dugan who runs the Bad Pitch blog, has also pulled together an incredibly detailed list of links to resources and tips on Twitter.  The depth of the tools, tips, workarounds took me a little by surprise, but then I’m still struggling with twitter.